It is, by now, the accepted belief that at Glenrowan Ned Kelly was riding Joe Byrne’s grey mare, Music. But, with the available contemporary evidence, can we prove this to be the case?
Category: Research
All about the journey of researching “Glenrowan”.
In my poking around through various documents related to the story of the gang I found a bundle through the Public Records Office of Victoria that included a list of items that had been recovered from the gang, mostly at Glenrowan.
“It was that moment that I realised how important it is to understand people from history, just as we do with people in the present, based on contextual factors and free of prejudices. That is to say that they deserve to be looked at based upon demonstrable qualities rather than trying to pigeon hole them based on perceptions or preconceived ideas. People are nuanced, multifaceted beings. They have virtues and flaws, regardless of which is more dominant, and these often paradoxical elements coalesce into what we define as a personality. It’s all very Yin/Yang, but this is the reality.”
A brief biography of the man that hanged Ned Kelly.
The core of the Glenrowan story is Ned Kelly. Everything that occurs is either directly or indirectly linked to him and his decisions. Naturally this should position him as the protagonist of the story, though protagonist usually implies that character is the “good guy”. As I’ve discovered, simplistic terms like “good”, “bad”, “hero”, or “villain” are just completely inadequate to describe someone as complex as Edward Kelly.
Aidan Phelan discusses the challenge of working out what to keep in snd what to take out when adapting history into a narrative text.
Glenrowan 